The Mood Board
So… in 1994 the Herberts and Lindsey Casbon set their minds to the task of creating something different. This is where the mood board came in: why was it, they wondered, that apart from Bananarama in the ‘80s, and to a lesser extent Eternal in the ‘90, there had never been a massive-selling, all-female British group? They suspected that it was because female groups, unlike the boy bands that were such an established feature of the pop landscape, tended to be of limited interest to girls. The Herbert’s starting point, therefore, and the one unarguable stroke of genius in their vision, was to come up with the idea of a female version of Take That which would aim to appeal primarily to young girls. Chris Herbert: The whole teen-band scene at the time was saturated by boy bands. It was all clones of New Kids On The Block and Take That. That was all a bit of a yawn for me, and only appealed to female audiences. At the time I just thought to myself, you know, it’s possible to kinda do this with a girl band. I felt that if you could appeal to the boys as well, you’d be laughing.If you could put together a girl band which was both sassy, for the girls, and with obvious sexy appeal, to attract the boys, you’d double your audience and double everything else that went with it. I think at the time Bob wanted to do a boy band. And just like we always do in this industry we followed a safe formula. And that was working very well, and that was when I said ‘Let do this instead. I think this one could work.’ From there to the details quickly fell into places. They reasoned that like Take That there should be five in the group, because a gang of four will invariably split up into two separate camps, increasing the likelihood of feuds and potentially damaging disputes (the wisdom of this was demonstrated years later when All Saints – a quartet who were touted as the successors to the Spice Girls – ended up, divided into pairs). A five-piece, the Herberts decided, would feel like a proper group and be a good, democratically balanced number. So what would they look like? The mood board brightened up as the Herberts started going through magazines, tearing out pictures of girls – models, actresses, singers, whoever – who looked like the ones they would want to see in their band. “Here’s some expenses. Find some girls,” Bob told Chris. Chris rose to the challenge with predictable enthusiasm, but rather than searching for singers, he began his quest by looking in clubs and pubs for girls with the “right” image. This may have looked suspiciously like an excuse to go out on the pull, but the Herberts, however, were more systematic, shifting through photographs from stage schools and dance academies in the field, so to speak, and as well as trawling the local night-spots, took to hanging out at stage doors, handing out flyers whenever West End shows held auditions for singers or dancers.